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Mesa

Introduction

The goal of this project is to preserve and present primary and secondary source materials (including specifications, source code, manuals, and papers discussing design and implementation) from Mesa, the system programming language designed at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and used to implement the Xerox Star office automation system and its follow-ons. The editor greatly appreciates comments, suggestions, and donations of additional materials.

Documentation

Mesa 1.0

"This collection of documentation describes the initial release of the Mesa programming system, Mesa library packages, and operational procedures for the Alto. It is intended as a preliminary effort, for use by experienced systems programmers operating in the Parc and SDD/Palo Alto environment. Substantial evolution of both the system and this documentation should be anticipated.

The Mesa, language, compiler and programming system are the product of a long-standing research project at Parc, in which Chuck Geschke, Butler Lampson, Jim Mitchell, and Ed Satterthwaite have been the main participants. The current compiler was written by Geschke and Satterthwaite. They also wrote the debugger and support software needed to run Mesa programs on the Alto, in collaboration with Jim Mitchell and with Charles Irby, Richard Johnsson and John Wick of SOD/Palo Alto. Compiler testing has been done by Jim Frandeen of SDD/Palo Alto."

Mesa 4.0

James G. Mitchell, William Maybury, and Richard Sweet. Mesa Language Manual. Version 4.0, May 1978. PDF at bitsavers.org

C. M. Geschke and J. G. Mitchell. On the problem of uniform references to data structures. In Proceedings of the international conference on Reliable software. ACM, New York pages 31-42. ACM Digital Library

Hugh C. Lauer and Edwin H. Satterthwaite. The Impact of Mesa on System Design. Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Software Engineering, Munich, Germany, September 1979. IEEE Computer Society, 1979. PDF at bitsavers.org

James G. Mitchell. Mesa from the perspective of a designer turned user. In Proceedings of the international conference on APL (APL '81), William L. Anderson and David G. Smith (Eds.). ACM, New York. PDF at bitsavers.orgACM Digital Library